Editors' Review

If you love music but hate jumping from Firefox to music player and back whenever you want to adjust your tunes, FoxyTunes is the plug-in for you.

FoxyTunes gives you control of your favorite music player from within Firefox, so there's no more switching windows to skip that Barry Manilow ditty you forgot to delete. The interface is easy to use and is highly customizable. When opened, it shows a navigation array with buttons for Play, Pause, Mute, Next Track, Last Track, Volume, and the useful Show Player, which unhides your music player. There's also a Hide Player button, as well as a music Search tool, keyboard shortcuts, skins, and a mini player that places the app controls on your desktop.

Supported players include iTunes, Winamp, RealPlayer, XMPlay and Last.fm, as well as nearly two dozen others and a "custom player" option. The lyric and album art searches have been expanded with FoxyTunes' new music portal, which provides feeds from Google, YouTube, Amazon.com, Last.fm, Wikipedia, and several online radio stations to make music discovery easier.

FoxyTunes' strengths are in the depth of available features plus the level of customization. Weaknesses? Only that you'll wish all Firefox add-ons were this good.

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Publisher's Description

FoxyTunes is an Extension for Mozilla Firefox that supports the Mozilla Suite and Mozilla Thunderbird. It allows you to control your favorite media player without leaving the browser. The controls are positioned on the status bar or one of the toolbars, so no extra space is wasted. FoxyTunes has several nice features. You can control the playback, adjust the volume, and see what's playing. Many more features are in development, among them advanced music-related searches.

Version 2.9.6 adds support for VLC Media Player as well as Signature for Thunderbird.

What's new in this version:

Version 2.9.6 adds support for VLC Media Player as well as Signature for Thunderbird.

Full of SPYWARE. It slowed firefox down tremendously. I was left scratching my head re cause. Finally noticed lots of cookies being set and suddenly saw this program connecting to www.888.com. Removed it. Now no cookies. No problem.

Summary

As mentioned in negatives. I have written to Foxytunes asking why it is connecting to firefox etc and have recived no replies. If Firefox is running slow and sluggish , consider this program as the main culprit. I just could not understand how I was getting huge amounts of cookies being set. With it no longer on my system everything seems to be running at top speed

Updated on Dec 3, 2009

Re the "connecting to firefox bit " .. that was actually meant to read " connecitng to www.888.com " which is a gambling site , if I am not mistaken.

It has a nice sound, that is, it plays music, well, it played a song for me that it came pre-loaded with, by some guy named "Larry," before I shut it off.

Cons

Only slightly less than pointless. I suppose if you are unable to figure out how to set up whatever player you use so that it can play minimized, well, then this might be something nifty. I use WinAmp and I keep it in a bar at the top of the screen. I have to click on the minimized icon to view it (I chose not to keep it "always on top"), which isn't a hassle, but I thought something built into Firefox might be nifty. I mean, CNET and PC Magazine both fell all over themselves to praise it, and right there in the Add-on description at Mozilla, WinAmp was listed as the number one browser. Cool.

But that's not how it worked. "Just click on the orange note and select your player" is only accurate if your player is "generic player" or one of the six players listed...none of which is the first player listed as being supported, my player, WinAmp. Indeed, there are twenty-some "supported" players --- but only six in the list of "players."

It's not that these players aren't supported (though I uninstalled it rather than futz with it . . . it doesn't do anything important enough to be bothered with), they well might be --- it's that the whole "description" is misleading . . . it isn't as easy as advertised and it really doesn't do anything special. Save even the tiny space this would take up on your hardrive, save your time, support truth in advertising and support your favorite player directly.

My Foobar2000 player sits in the tray, so the advantage of using FoxyTunes instead of the player requires a movement of my wrist equivalent to a quarter of an inch. And keep in mind that every extension slows down Firefox a little.

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